The Self Organizing City

Each module in Designing Cities will focus on a different aspect of city design including: How Today’s City Evolved; The Ideas That Shape Cities; Tools for Designing Cities; Making Cities Sustainable; Cities in the Information Age; Preserving Older Cities; Designing New Cities, Districts and Neighborhoods; The Challenges of Informal Cities and Disadvantaged Neighborhoods; and Visionary Cities. Materials will be presented by the instructors and guest faculty from PennDesign through a series of five or more lessons per module, each typically 10-12 minutes long.
The first lesson in each module will be a roundtable discussion among professors Stefan Al, Jonathan Barnett, and Gary Hack introducing the big issues associated with the subject. Each succeeding module will be a self-contained illustrated presentation of a set of ideas and images. There will be a list of suggested readings for those who wish to follow up on the ideas in each module.
Everyone enrolled in Designing Cities will be expected to complete 3 assignments. These will be posted on the course site and they will be in the form of peer assessments. There will be a great deal to be learned from the ideas participants submit, reflecting cities of all sizes and circumstances across the globe so once you submit your assignment, you'll be able to see what your peers have done.

从本节课中

Visionary Cities

So far we have focused on city designs that were actually built. But throughout history, architects, artists and philosophers, have imagined and drawn up visionary cities. Many of these designs are what we call “paper” projects, since they were typically relegated to the drawing boards only, and never built. Despite this, some were very influential, and inspired generations of city designers.
This week we will look at visionary cities. A range of new historical conditions, whether technological progress, political situations, or environmental problems, have inspired designers to radically rethink the future of cities. We will focus on four kinds: technological visions, revolutionary visions, ecological visions, and self-organizing cities.
What would it be like to live in a walking robot, a floating city, or a flying spaceship? Is this mere science fiction, or the shape of cities to come? In the first lecture we will look at the most experimental cities of the past century, conjured up by designers electrified by technological progress.
What if our cities were covered with large domes to be more energy efficient, or if floating pods housed climate refugees and cleaned carbon-saturated air? In the second class we will look closer at some of the most visionary eco-cities.
Designing cities is also a form of colonization, a tool to help establish political control over a territory. In the third class we will look at visionary cities drawn up by designers armed with a radical political mission: to subvert or overthrow the establishment.
In reality, many parts of the world do not follow grand designs. As we have seen last week, informal settlements follow a different logic, often characterized by self-help housing construction. In the final lecture, we will see how some designers have tried to harvest some of the self-organizing processes in cities.
As you are handing in your third assignment this week, we hope that some of the examples shown will inspire you to rethink the way in which we organize our cities.